As God Is My Witness

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Over the next week, we're going to be hearing a lot about how the sequester is going to gut our national defense so that some country with 90 percent fewer aircraft carriers than we have, and 99.9 percent fewer nuclear weapons, is going to march on up through Texas and impose sharia law on Augusta just before the Masters. (Not that, ladywise, anyone there would either notice or complain much). In all the noise, though, you may not have heard that the F-35, the Flying Swiss Army Knife, aka The Lemon Of The Skies, got the entire fleet of itself grounded over the weekend by the Defense Department because someone found a cracked engine blade in one of the planes. I would suggest that someone check for cracked engine blades within the Pentagon's procurement staff.

In a brief written statement Friday, the Pentagon said it was too early to know the full impact of the newly discovered problem. A watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, said the grounding was not likely to mean a significant delay in the effort to field the aircraft. "The F-35 is a huge problem because of its growing, already unaffordable, cost and its gigantically disappointing performance," the group's Winslow Wheeler said. "That performance would be unacceptable even if the aircraft met its far-too-modest requirements, but it is not."

This thing already has cost $400 billion and it can...not...fly. (In the parlance of NFL coaches, the F-35 can't stay on the field.) This is the second time in two months that the entire fleet has had to be grounded. Not only that, but you and I and your Uncle Fud are all paying for most of the best pilots in the military to hang around Eglin Air Force Base, taxi these turkeys out onto the runways, and then taxi them back again because nobody dares to send them aloft.

But just as the program appeared to be taking off, it was grounded over a variety of concerns. They range from improperly installed parachutes under the pilots' ejector seats, to worries at the Pentagon that there has not been enough testing of the jets, to ongoing concerns by some in Congress that the entire F-35 program is too expensive. Its projected cost has jumped from $233 billion to an estimated $385 billion, including development. Forty-three F-35s have been built and another 2,443 have been ordered by the Pentagon.

They have built 43 of these. None of them can fly. So, naturally, we need almost 2500 more. The obscenity for this has not yet been coined.